ServiceNow ‘Xanadu’ brings AI agents to Now Platform

ServiceNow’s latest Now Platform release, dubbed Xanadu, adds a host of new features, including ServiceNow AI Agents, which the company heralds as “a new era of collaboration between people and AI.”

Taking center stage in Tuesday’s release are ServiceNow’s plans to integrate “agentic AI” — AI systems that can autonomously perform tasks and make decisions on their own within set parameters — into its enterprise service management platform.

The first ServiceNow AI Agents, which the company says will be available in November, will be customer service management (CSM) AI agents and IT service management (ITSM) AI agents. These AI agents will use advanced reasoning, supported by cross-enterprise data from the Now Platform, to provide “deep contextual comprehension,” reducing mean-time-to resolution.

ServiceNow stressed that humans will still be in the loop for oversight and governance, adding that autonomous agents will subsequently be rolled out to support use cases across IT, customer service, procurement, HR, software development, and more.

“With ServiceNow AI Agents, we are announcing our vision to leverage AI agents that can understand the environment, tap into all available data across the enterprise, and use that data to make decisions and act,” said Dorit Zilbershot, VP of product management for AI at ServiceNow. “ServiceNow agents will unlock 24/7 productivity across hundreds of tools, unique use cases, and gen AI skills.”

ServiceNow said its first use cases, CSM AI agents and ITSM AI agents, will deliver a boost to live agent productivity, helping them solve employee and customer issues by comprehending context, creating a step-by-step process for resolution, and executing on that plan with approvals from live agents where needed.

The company’s vision is one in which humans act as skilled administrators of a team of ServiceNow AI Agents that can manage multiple concurrent tasks and end-to-end workflows.

Generative AI, data enhancements

To support the release, ServiceNow also announced the general availability of Now Assist Skill Kit, which empowers organizations to create custom generative AI skills for their specific business needs. With the Skill Kit, customers can build, test, and deploy gen AI skills and their underlying prompts, select models, and assign the skills to applications, connecting to data and knowledge within the Now Platform for context.

In addition to AI Agents, Xanadu adds more than 350 out-of-the-box gen AI capabilities to Now Assist, including data visualization generation, chat- and email-reply generation, change summaries, and LLM-based proactive prompts in Virtual Agent.

It has added Now Assist for Security Operations (SecOps) and Now Assist for Sourcing and Procurement Operations. Now Assist for SecOps promises to boost response times to security threats by transferring interactions with AI-driven incident summarizations and interactive Q&A to SecOps teams. Now Assist for Sourcing and Procurement Operations supports the procurement intake process, allowing employees to initiate a procurement request or access information through a conversational prompt rather than navigating complex systems.

ServiceNow also said Now Assist integration with Copilot for Microsoft 365 is now generally available, allowing Copilot to now hand off automated self-service tasks (like ordering a new computer or inquiring about company policies) to Now Assist in Microsoft Teams.

To support all this, ServiceNow has made data enhancements to the Now Platform itself.  The cornerstone of these enhancements is the inclusion of the RaptorDB Pro high-performance database in the platform’s data layer. ServiceNow says it provides a 53% improvement in overall transaction times and a 3X increase in transactional throughput across workflows, enabling more users and more workflows on ServiceNow instances.

“Three times more transactional throughput. That means more and more services can be put onto the platform, and more and more departments can be brought into the fold to take advantage of this amazing technology,” said Heath Ramsey, VP of outbound product management at ServiceNow.

Other Xanadu additions include an integrated development environment (IDE); enhanced automation capabilities to streamline application management, issue resolution, and operations; and a guided self-service capability in Employee Center.